Chapter 40 Children's Learning (5)

Before this age, there is no essential difference between girls' education and boys' education, only in minor details.Girls are more restrained and have more things to do than boys.Girls always come last when it comes to receiving gifts and favors.Nor can they be as bad-tempered as boys.But they still have an astonishing freedom: they can wear bright red, play and row outside with the boys, and often won't give up.From the age of 6 to 9, they gradually understand their responsibilities to society, and their situations and experiences are roughly the same as those of boys. After the age of nine, schools separate boys and girls into classes, and boys gradually begin to value their newfound masculine solidarity.They reject girls and are afraid of being seen talking to girls.The mother also warned girls not to have sex with boys

Children socialize.It is said that girls of this age are often melancholy, reclusive, and difficult to educate.Japanese women say this is the end of "children's joy".Girls' infancy ends when boys are ostracized.Since then, their life path can only be "self-respect and self-respect".This dogma will last forever, before and after marriage. A boy who understands "self-respect" and "giri to society" does not mean that he understands all the responsibilities of Japanese men.The Japanese say: "Boys start to learn 'giri to duty' from the age of 10", which means "giri hates humiliation".Boys have to learn the rules of when to attack someone directly and when to use indirect means to clear the stigma.I don't think they mean that children learn to fight back when insulted.Boys have already learned to be rough with their mothers when they were young, and to slander and argue with children of the same age. There is no need to learn how to attack opponents after the age of 10. The specification of gigi to share is to fit their attack style into a recognized pattern and provide specific treatment methods.As mentioned earlier, the Japanese tend to direct their attacks on themselves rather than using violence against others, and schoolchildren are no exception.

Teenagers who continue on to higher education after the six-year primary school (about 15 percent of the population, with a higher proportion of boys) immediately face a tough secondary school entrance examination.The competition involves every examinee and every subject, and these teenagers will soon assume the responsibility of "responsibility to their duty".They have no gradual experience of this kind of competition, because competition is kept to a minimum in elementary school and at home.This sudden test makes the competition more intense and worrisome.But it's not this fierce rivalry that the Japanese talk about most in their nostalgia, but the habit of upper middle school students bullying younger ones.The high-grade students boss around the low-grade students, try their best to make fun of them, and let the low-grade students perform various humiliating stunts.The lower grades resented it.Japanese boys don't take these things as a joke.A boy forced to servile and crawl in front of his seniors will grind his teeth and plot revenge.And because you can't retaliate immediately, you will be more brooding and grudge.A few years later, he may use his family power to pull the other party down from his position; or practice fencing or judo hard, and take revenge in public after graduation, making the other party look ugly.If you can't avenge this grievance, you will always be "unresolved."

Those teenagers who didn't make it to high school had a similar experience in the military.One out of every four youths in Japan is drafted into the army. The bullying of the first-year soldiers by the second-year soldiers is far more serious than the bullying of the junior high school students by the upper grades.The officers never questioned this, and the non-commissioned officers intervened only in exceptional circumstances.The first rule of Japanese military code is that it is humiliating to complain to an officer.Disputes were settled among the soldiers themselves.The officers saw it as a way to "work out" the troops and were not involved in it.Veterans would take out the grudges of the previous year on recruits to show how well they had been "trained."It is said that conscripts, once trained in the army, often become something else, "truly militaristic nationalists."This change is not because they have received totalitarian state theory education, nor is it because they have been indoctrinated with the idea of ​​loyalty to the emperor. The important reason is that they have experienced various humiliating experiences.Japanese upbringing produces young people who are extremely sensitive to "self-esteem", and once caught in this environment, they can easily become barbaric.They cannot bear humiliation.They interpret this torture as rejection, which makes them themselves adept torturers.

The nature of the above-mentioned state of affairs in the middle schools and in the army of modern Japan derives, of course, from the ancient Japanese customs of ridicule and insult.The Japanese response to such customs was not created by the schools and the military.Taunting and torture are more unbearable than in the United States, thanks to Japan's traditional norm of "giri to obedience."Although the taunted group will in turn abuse another victim group, this does not prevent the insulted teenager from seeking revenge on the abuser.In many western countries, it is a common folk custom to find a scapegoat to vent the anger. vent.Japanese boys, of course, also use this method to eliminate resentment, but their main concern is direct revenge.The abused must "feel good" in direct revenge against the abuser.

Leaders who care about Japan's future should pay special attention to this custom of humiliating young people in Japanese schools and military in the cause of rebuilding Japan after the war.The "spirit of love for the school" and "relationship with old classmates" should be fully emphasized to eliminate the bad habit of bullying the small with the big and low with the high.The military must strictly prohibit the abuse of recruits.Although veterans should conduct strict training for recruits, insisting on strict requirements is not an insult in Japan, but mocking and mistreating them are insults.In schools and in the army, any senior student or veteran who makes junior students or recruits wag their tails to pretend to be dogs, imitate cicadas, or make them "stand on top" during meal times must be severely punished.Such a change would be more effective in re-educating Japan than denying the emperor's divinity and removing nationalism from textbooks.

Girls do not learn the code of "giri to one's duty," nor do boys experience it in middle school or military training, nor do they have anything like it.Their lives are far more stable than men's.Since they are sensible, they have received a kind of education: no matter what, boys are the first, and girls have no share in gifts and care.The rules of life they must respect are: they do not have the privilege of publicly expressing their self-assertion.They enjoy the privileged life of Japanese children just like boys in their infancy.When they are young girls, they can wear bright red clothes, but they can no longer wear them when they are adults, until the second privileged period, that is, after the age of 60.In the family, too, they are like brothers who can be favored by discordant mothers and grandmothers.In addition, younger siblings always want older sisters and other family members to be "closest" to them.Children ask to sleep with their older sisters to show their affection.The elder sister often distributes the favors given by the grandmother to the two-year-old toddler.The Japanese don't like to sleep alone, and at night, a young child can put the quilt next to his favorite elder. The evidence of "you are closest to me" is that the beds of two people are close together.After the age of nine or ten, girls are excluded from boys' playmates, but are compensated in other ways.They can show off their new hairstyles, which are the most refined for girls aged 14 to 18 in Japan.They can wear silk clothes, where previously they could only wear cotton clothes.At this time, the family will do everything possible to dress them up to make them more beautiful.In this way, the girl also got a certain degree of satisfaction.